Sentences: a new world-building tool for on-chain collaborative storytelling

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On-chain Collaborative World Building: A New Type of Narrative Generation Tool

An important feature of on-chain game design is the high emphasis on collective decision-making. To explore this characteristic, we developed a collaborative world-building tool called Sentences. The core of this tool is an original structure based on merely additive branching narratives. Sentences utilizes MUD technology to create a lightweight environment for generating collective narratives. Each time a new game is launched, a brand new world is created, and players enrich this world by gradually adding legends.

Design Concept

In the realm of autonomous worlds, new projects often require collective "world-building", which means creating a shared lore system that determines how players experience this world. This process is usually informal and unstructured, but it can also be guided through organized prompts and exercises to help world builders shape the structure and coherence of their world.

These exercises themselves constitute a world. They establish an information system among the narrators, and this set of rules allows the narration to flourish. The rules themselves are the world, creating a pending reality space for the birth of new ideas. The choice of exercises will inevitably affect the narratives created: a set of questions will assume a potential space of answers; prompts in one direction may hinder exploration in another direction.

Therefore, Sentences can be seen as a "world-building world", a primitive sandbox for collaborative knowledge generation. Its design is simple and constrained, intended to serve as a laboratory for testing new ideas. In the world of Sentences, there are no other means of interaction or contribution besides expanding the narrative. The construction of the world is linear, but it can branch in multiple directions from the initial seed.

Operating Mechanism

When players load the Sentences client, if there is no ongoing world, the system will provide an option to generate a new world. After generation, players will receive a prompt to develop the story. For example:

"This society values nature the most" "This civilization is completely dependent on level" "This group is built on money."

After the world is generated, the author has a fixed time (set to 20 blocks) to propose new supplementary content for the story. Once the time is up, the voting phase begins, where participants choose their favorite proposal. The proposal with the most votes will be added to the story, and then this process starts again.

If no proposals are made within the stipulated time, the world will "perish." But this perishing is not permanent; the world is merely archived. Since all proposals and votes are recorded on-chain, each world retains a complete history of possible developmental directions, and these "perishing" branches represent a series of possible parallel universes.

Technical Implementation

The narrative state is managed by two interrelated systems: one responsible for the generation of new narratives, and the other handling time, voting, and proposals for new content.

The initial story consists of sentences randomly selected from a preset list of prompts. These prompts are generated through a simple replacement syntax script. Future versions may replicate this script within the contract to provide a more diverse starting point.

After the story is initialized, the initial prompt is added to the chain, and a new proposal period begins. This cycle lasts for n blocks (approximately one second each), defined by the variable periodEndsBlock.

During the proposal period, participants put forward new narrative entries and vote to determine the direction of the expansion. Proposals and voting are handled by a specialized system, which verifies the timing of contributions based on the periodEndsBlock variable. Each proposal points to a "parent," and successful proposals form a linked list.

At the end of the proposal period, the system counts the votes for each proposal. In case of a tie, a proposal is randomly selected. If there are no proposals, the story ends and is archived.

Application Scenarios

Sentences are best suited for scenarios involving 10 to 50 participants, who may know each other or may not, but gather together in the spirit of creating prototype legends. For example, activities can be organized on social platforms with the goal of generating five new worlds within an hour.

As an independent tool, Sentences may not be particularly engaging; it feels more like a tool than a complete world. However, as a modular component, the narrative generation mechanism of Sentences can be well integrated into richer role-playing games, weaving the structure of the game throughout the gameplay. Its voting mechanism can also be used to support the inclusion of generative outputs in player-generated prompts.

Future Outlook

A clear direction for the expansion of Sentences is to allow the creators of the world to set specific rules that determine how new sentences are appended to the narrative. For example, these rules could modify the voting system, requiring a certain number of players to participate in order to continue the narrative, or adjust the voting time to change the pace of the narrative development. In this way, Sentences not only becomes a prototyping tool for the design of the world but also a prototyping tool for the constraints that generate specific storytelling styles and dialogue structures.

Another interesting development direction is to generate parallel worlds from the "death" branches of the current world. The best way to achieve this may be to generate a new "New World" contract that contains pointers to the old branches, rather than generating a new world completely from scratch.

Overall, Sentences provides an innovative framework for building an on-chain collaborative world, showcasing the potential of blockchain technology in the creative field while offering a unique experimental platform for collective narrative creation.

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AirdropBuffetvip
· 14h ago
Players determine the worldview? Are we here to play the Consensus test?
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CafeMinorvip
· 08-11 18:07
MUD is just a text-based game... What's new about it?
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MetaMaskVictimvip
· 08-09 21:00
It's probably just another trap for suckers.
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ProposalDetectivevip
· 08-09 20:56
Geography is so complicated, more serious than anyone else.
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FloorSweepervip
· 08-09 20:48
The floor is coming down? I'm the first to rush in!
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MindsetExpandervip
· 08-09 20:45
Even the designers of blockchain games don't play them.
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